By Anne W. Semmes
With all the natural disasters occurring around the world one country is speaking to me today – Sudan. The United Nations is reporting Sudan as suffering “the world’s largest and most devastating humanitarian crisis.” With its army at war with a “powerful paramilitary group” with some 12 million people being forced to flee their homes, there’s starvation and “evidence of genocide in the western region of Darfur, where residents say they have been targeted by fighters based on their ethnicity.”
But 40 years ago, in 1985, I witnessed that country suffering from famine from a severe drought, and deforestation. I was airlifted along with three million dollars ($11 million plus worth today) of food and medicine, all made possible by a Greenwich native, Bob Macauley, founder of Americares Foundation (in 1982), now headquartered in Stamford, CT.
The wonder of how one person could engineer the gathering of life-saving material from 19 pharmaceutical companies, wheat and beans from two food companies, and surgical equipment, then charter a 747-cargo plane to come to the rescue of malnourished Sudanese children was near-miraculous.
Bob also had a plan to plant a million trees in Darfur, so I was accompanied by two foresters, and I was brought on as a chronicler. (Those trees would alas be planted instead in Kenya.)
Mind you Bob had some influential friends. His roommate at Yale was George H. W. Bush, then serving as Vice-President. I received a press release from the Vice-President’s office on April 4, two months before our June liftoff noting the signing of a bill (HR1289) bringing “an additional $1 billion in food aid and disaster relief to drought-stricken Africa.” The release also noted the “superb job” of Americares about to “emergency airlift 250,000 pounds of medicine, vitamins, food, blankets and tents…from the people of the United States to the people of Sudan – with love.”
Landing in Sudan
Landing in the capital city of Khartoum, the two foresters and I would then be put in a small plane to fly across the desert landscape of Darfur in search of where to plant a million trees. What I witnessed below me and on the ground will be with me forever. Such primitive conditions, and such shortage of water as well as food. At one water source the lineup of those waiting with their buckets went as far as the eye could see. Its effect upon me post-journey was that I would send $100 for a truckload of water, with a photo sent later showing me the joy it brought.
“Their ability to endure suffering is far greater than my ability to witness it,” Bob had shared with me after his trip to Sudan three months before mine. That spoke to me having seen that elderly Sudanese woman carrying a bucket on her head, knowing that some must travel a day’s journey for water. And this woman had a metal peg leg.
“You see a situation,” Bob is quoted, and you have to move, boom, boom, boom.” He liked that Nike slogan, “Just do it” before it became a marketing slogan. He’d grown up in Deer Park in Greenwich, attended Greenwich Country Day School, then Andover before Yale. But it was Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II he would call treasured friends. The Pope had once asked Bob to organize relief for the pontiff’s native Poland. He managed to airlift $1.5 million in medical supplies to Poland in March of 1982.
Bob Macauley’s Outreach
Ten years before my Sudan trip, Bob had mortgaged his New Canaan home to charter a jet to rescue a hundred and more injured Vietnamese orphans after an Air Force transport plane carrying 300 orphans for adoption in the U.S. crashed while taking off. Most accurate is how a former AmeriCares President and CEO Curt Welling described Bob. “Americares was an extension of Bob Macauley and a reflection of his personal vision and commitment to not take no for an answer when it came to helping people.”
Surely what motivated Bob and what inspired me was experiencing firsthand humanity in crisis. I have a photo of a young boy in a rare tree in Darfur, who manages to give me a smile in the midst of that severe drought. Fortitude was found both in Darfur and in Khartoum. It being the Moslems’ holy month of Ramadan, they aren’t allowed to eat or drink from sunrise to sunset. But there in 130-degrees heat, I espied a metal worker pounding away on a molten-hot anvil.
That Sudan experience of over 40 years ago as orchestrated by Bob Macauley has left an indelible imprint. Yet, little did I know at this writing I would find that letter tucked in my Sudan file showing how else that Sudan trip had impacted. The letter was from Beth Bush (Mrs. Prescott Bush) late of Greenwich. She was in London working on her book about her brother, Draper Kauffman, as founder of the Navy SEALS. Turning on her recorder she’d found a recording she made of my interviewing Barbara Bush for my program “Inner View” on Greenwich’s WGCH radio, prior to my airlift to Sudan. Barbara was addressing her trip with the Vice President and Bob Macauley to Sudan. Reminded I was they had accompanied Bob on his earlier trip!
“The questions – and especially the ending were so moving [of their trip],” wrote Beth. And gripped she was over Barbara remarking, “For what we would spend on a pair of shoes, a family could be fed for a week.” Beth then wrote of coming across in London “lovely dinner plates which I thought we ‘needed’…at $400 a real bargain (compared to home).” But after hearing that recorded interview she’d decided “a much better bargain would be to send that $400 to Americares.”
